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Years back when as a greenhorn I entered into business I could never understand how sometimes a business partner get advertising at 40-50% off the normal rates. I thought then, that the profits roll in when you sell high enough. But the problem with selling high enough is that unless you successfully create an air of hype and exclusivity around your products or services your competitors might give the same quality at a bit lower price.

Sensibly, the best thing was to get down on knowing the best way to buy cheapest without compromising quality. There are 3 key areas where everyone ought to apply the principle of brilliant buying;

a) Advertisement: These days advertising is about the costliest means of marketing. When I wasn’t conversant with the idea of brilliant buying I always paid advertising media the full advert rates as stated in their rate cards. I thought they were non-negotiable. I must have been seriously naive. To push a product permanently into the minds of TV viewers and radio listeners we spent awfully so much that we later couldn’t afford to use advertising. Good enough that got us into thinking of more effective and low cost ways of getting people to do business with us.

Still if you are a business owner who would love to put your products/services on air it will pay to insist stubbornly on paying not more than 50-60% of stated rates. One way is to contact the advert section stating that you are willing to pay a certain percentage of stated rates ( 50% or 60% ) AND request that if their organization has a vacant ad space unsold they could put yours at the rate you specified.. Better still discuss with the media bodies in your area. Everything is negotiable in business.

b) Raw Materials: If you are in the manufacturing business or hospitality / food business where you’ll have to buy raw materials for conversion into products I daresay it is very important that you buy smartly. Buying smartly will entail hard negotiating to get the best prices available. Enquire if bulk buying comes with a sizeable discount. Enter into special private labeling deals or distributorships where you can get the products or raw materials at 30-60-% off. Most times you’d be surprised at how much you can reduce the cost of buying things needed in business.

c) Variable expenses: When Young and growing most companies keep a tight rein on their expenses but something happens when they grow fat and big. Money is then spent without justification. Money should not be spent to wasteful projects to assuage the feelings of any one person in the organization.

Brilliant spending and smart buying decisions will give your business a leg-up and ensure that your business becomes even more profitable.

If you have comments, questions or enquiries based on this article don’t hesitate to use the comment box below. We’ll try to answer or reply all questions.

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The articles might be down-to-earth but that’s what you will need if you hope to get onto the lane of big-earning business people. No long story here just real, hard-hitting facts, a little anecdote ( since people love stories to motivate them ) and lots of good, old advice.
Now back to the topic. I know you can’t wait anymore for what I’ve got to dish out.

The first advice however is this:

Don’t take anything you know for granted because what you know might be a revelation to others who don’t know it. But there still remains this nagging question, How on earth do you make tons of money from your skills if you don’t know what skills u have got ?

WHAT SKILLS CAN GIVE YOU AT LEAST A HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS ANNUALLY?
My answer? Almost any skill can. It all depends on how you package both yourself and your skills and also on how good you are with those talents or skills.
Before we start talking about how you can turn your unused gifts into millions lets first consider what kind of talents or skills you can actually work upon to earn your money.

A run down of talents or skills you can convert to real money makers include;
singing
comedy
writing
speaking
marketing skills
show organising/entertainment
art and craft
fashion designing
beauty enhancing
event organising
copywriting
data management
money management
fundraising
music production
science/inventing
baking
cooking/catering
chocolate making
coffee making
shopping
herbal knowledge
fitness
nutrition
fishing/fishcare
dog/pet grooming
mechanical repairs
gardening
martial arts
gaming
security
investigating
camping/travel

Of course there are so many others . We will unearth all the treasures wherever they may be found, just keep following our every move. With all these skills available nobody should have any excuse for not making enough money for themselves.
The most important thing is to know that you can make money from almost anything. We’ll teach you the tricks all free and fair. Right here!
We are also going to teach you how to survive in the shark infested waters of business and eat instead of being eaten.

And finally be ready for some commonsense advice that will beat off all the silly nonsense many people will want to fill you up with. Here it is Talents To Riches !!

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The natural reaction when a product fails is to push the blame to the consumers. I felt bad and believed that the failure of the product was neither my fault nor my firm’s. I had done everything I ought to do but people who needed my product simply refused to buy. But that was a wrong approach to take. I soon realized I had to do something about the product or let it go to waste entirely.

The next I did was to reduce the price of the product by almost half but I soon got to know that price had little or nothing to do with the failure of many products. I abandoned the whole project and tagged it a failure.

Sometimes walking away from a failed project and diverting your mind’s energy to something else helps. You can then take a long look at the project with an unbiased mind. Thinking from a distance I discovered some home truths. One of the most compelling facts I discovered was that I was very impatient and quite in a hurry to make that product sell and it reflected in everything I did. It was a book published by my own publishing firm so I had all the reasons why it should sell;
There was no other book like around
It addressed a problem that over a million people had.
There was no way they wouldn’t want it

Sometimes, the harsh realities of business pulls us all down from our dreaming loft in the moon to the real facts of what is obtainable. I saw that I was too self centred on that particular product. I grew so much in love with the product that I already thought every other person should

When these things happen what you need is a change of perspective . With the help of my team, the firm came up with a better attempt at understanding the market and I went back to give the book one more push. Ever so slowly it began to move. We came up with more ways of pushing that book and things took shape. The book wasn’t really one of the resoundingly successful products we had but the fact that it sold modestly when what we had earlier on our hands was dead duck goes to show that a change in perspective and then persistence helps in turning a dead product around.

If you have any questions and comments based on this article, don’t hesitate to use the comment box. We shall try to reply all comments and questions.

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The sheer volume of his media visibility is what every forward looking firm should copy. According to a recent story in New York Magazine, Obama “has hosted 15 town-hall meetings; appeared in more than 800 images on the White House Flickr photo-stream; and held four prime-time press conferences, the same number held by George W. Bush in his entire presidency.”

True, Most times what we really want is control over our message. Advertising buys you such control because you have final say over the content and where and how often the ad is placed–but it is openly biased, with commercial gain (sales) as the goal. PR, on the other hand, earns us credibility because seemingly unbiased third parties (i.e., media) are helping to propagate our message for us. PR is, in a way, a cloaked way to sell our wares without explicitly appearing to do so.

The Obama PR machine seems to be working for “brand Obama” and offers message control lessons for us all in business.

Tapping Into The Obama Publicity Strategy
Transparency
The best way to get something is to give something up first. Transparency is no longer just a buzz word, but an imperative for businesses of all sizes. For example, Obama has committed to publish all executive orders and proclamations on the White House website, something unprecedented.

Companies often get in their own way trying to hide information they feel is dangerous to their reputation. They are afraid of revealing trade secrets or data that undermine their ability to compete.

But this shouldn’t be so. Transparency means companies should no longer appear to be hiding anything from their customers, from sourcing and manufacturing to disclosing conflicts of interest and a rationale for pricing.

Some industries are especially vulnerable to the drive for transparency, especially financial services, health care and our government. That said–all businesses and entities will be better served by using transparency as part of their brand promise, just as Obama has done. Why? Doing so will help create new levels of trust between you and your stakeholders, and that will lead to mutually beneficial outcomes for everyone.

Expediency
A great PR strategy enables a company to have its messages placed among key media in a frequent and timely manner. Contrary to popular belief, frequency is not achieved through a blitzkrieg of press releases. Rather, it is by having bloggers, reporters, analysts and other brand influencers cite you as an expert for his or her “story.” He who speaks first often gets the media stage.

The popular “no comment” from CEOs when they think the press or for that matter the public ought not to know anything about their company is an opportunity for someone else. It is an opportunity for guessing and speculations which in the end gives the media a perceived view of issues which may be totally wrong but which they pass on to viewers and readers as the case may be

President Obama makes a habit to quickly respond to issues either directly or through his communications team; every CEO should learn that.

Omnipresence
According Accuracy in Media, Obama is spending $5M a year alone on staff salaries devoted to communications with great emphasis on internet driven communications (Facebook and Twitter), minority-targeted communications, town hall meetings, press conferences and television appearances.

For most consumer-focused companies, being present and proactive on Facebook and Twitter is an important way to stay relevant to and connected with consumers.
All companies should look to social media to at least monitor, listen to and acknowledge what their stakeholders are saying about their brand. Start with baby steps, making sure that you are on Wikipedia and that your website and your releases are search engine optimized. If you blog, do it regularly or don’t do it all. There is no one-size-fits-all social media tactic or program, but piloting a few social media initiatives will no doubt help you continue to protect and grow your brand and your business.

Obama’s publicity strategy should be the new pointer for us all. The corporate world must have missed a master publicist in Obama to the benefit of politics

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1) Start a small business pages publication to cover the businesses in your city. You can categorize the businesses into manufacturing, financial and banking, hospitality, educational, technological etc and charge them small fees to get listed in the business directory. If you can come up with a good distribution strategy that will make the publication enter as many hands as possible the business owners will be willing to pay to get information about their business listed in your business directory.

Then distribute free to all major points of human activity in your city. If you are able to collect listing fees from a couple of dozens you will be making a neat profit. The business pages/directory can be monthly or quarterly.

2) Offer reciprocal marketing advice to businesses; This entails finding businesses in need of more customers (every business does) and linking them up with another remotely related business in need of more customers as well. You only need to get them to refer customers to each other and collect your consulting fee.

3) Help businesses create cheap, marketing campaigns for businesses and charge them for your services. When I was setting out newly in business I knew so much about marketing and I needed to make money fast so I leveraged on my marketing knowledge and sent out a free marketing report tagged “Five marketing tips your competitors would never want you to know.” The next day I got calls from a clothing store owner and a restaurant. That kick-started my consulting business which has really taken off now. You can do same.

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In Business, selling is the single most important thing to keep the company alive. Whether it’s products you are selling or services you’ll only remain in business if you exchange enough of them for money.

There is something about selling that costs many businesses profits they otherwise should have made. That is failing to sell brilliantly. Brilliant selling is a combination of selling strategies aimed at reducing the cost incurred when you sell your products and services thus maximizing profits accrued from the selling process.

The selling process of any competitive business firm should be such that only a reasonable cost is incurred in order to sell. Here are three keys to selling brilliantly and profitably;

a) Focus It: In an earlier business article I stressed the importance of Focus Marketing. In trying to get consumers for your goods and services it is important that you do not make the mistake of trying to spread out too far and try to reach everybody. The cost you incur in doing that will make whatever sales you get insignificant. Unless you have a marketing budget in the billions you’d be digging a hole for your business trying to reach everybody.

Focusing your selling is one brilliant way of reducing your costs and maximizing your profits. If you are selling baby wears and products for example, maybe it’s time to get your team to come up with a cost effective way of targeting the real market for your goods-mothers. Focusing your marketing and selling on the target audience would pay you better both in the short and long term run. That is why most mail order businesses prefer to rent or buy mailing lists containing exactly the kind of people their products are meant for rather than send out mails randomly.

b) Attract Bees To the Honey: Attraction is a powerful force in business. Brilliant businessmen know how to attract prospective customers to their business. To attract people you’ll have to come up with an irresistible offer or give some valuable offer away for free. The free thing still works if you know how to come up with a unique offer. When I launched one of my information products on the net, teaching job seekers how to get the jobs they want I also packaged an entirely free version of the e-book for interested visitors. Thousands of that free e-book was requested and downloaded and quite a reasonable number followed up to buy the main thing. Though that was on a small scale, you’ll do your business a lot of good if you come up with a low cost way of attracting thousands of prospective customers or clients to your business. Your next headache will then be how to convert and hold them as loyal customers after that.

c) Build exclusivity: When you sell brilliantly you’ll need to learn that one magical way of getting thrice the profit of your products through exclusivity. Creating mega-hyped sense of exclusivity around their products and services is what makes companies sell a product or service at more than 1000% of what it ordinarily can be sold for. Take the example of the coveted 36 Ferrari GTOs, the only ones that were ever built between 1962 and 1964. There is a once-in-every five years Moet & Chandon Tour to celebrate these rare breed of cars. That is not message. The message is that these cars became so much hyped and famed that according to Men’s Vogue magazine each was worth up to $20 million. That is the power of hype and exclusivity. The degrees of exclusivity varies and no matter what business you are in you can come up with some form of an attractive crowd pulling exclusive offer.

A brilliant selling or marketing strategy for your company will be better off with a mix of the 3 keys .And don’t forget, to sell brilliantly is to minimize costs attached to selling and marketing and maximizing profits from sales.

If you have comments, questions or enquiries based on this article don’t hesitate to use the comment box below. We’ll try to answer or reply all questions.

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Fear has always been, and will still be the bane of most Entrepreneurs especially the young, new and inexperienced ones. The ability to fight and overcome fear differentiates between the successful and unsuccessful business owners.
It is very common for young entrepreneurs to entertain fears especially at the onset of their business. I remember the first appointment I had with the CEO of a company in my neighbourhood years ago when I was kicking of my ICT training program. It took me nearly one week to make up my mind. One sentence I usually use to muster courage is “If am afraid to take opportunities, then I should be ready to embrace poverty” The word poverty detests me a lot and it usually spurs me into action.

As an entrepreneur or a-would-be entrepreneur, you should prepare your mind against every discouraging factor like fear and inferiority syndrome. Sit down and write down some punch lines that will help spur you into action when you experience such discouraging factors.

Most times, I wonder the kind of hearts Kids have; if you have ever been with kids between 1-4 years of age, you will notice the never-afraid-attitude in them. Kids can do anything, ask for anything bravely, even jump down from a storey building. But as they grow the adults around them would start instilling fears in them through various ways.

To combat fear in business you must emulate kids when taking crucial business decisions. This doesn’t mean you should blindly walk into death trap. You should study every terrain you want to go into, weigh the evens and the odds, if from you study you find the business/decision very okay and promising don’t be afraid to start.

Lesson: Take some time to study one or two kids around you today, note down various courageous actions and characteristics you find in them, try to appy them in your life, I bet you will see a change.

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I preach commonsense because it appears many are losing theirs. A sensitive issue like Time management has been on the front burner especially in our modern world of sophistication, technology and fast living. Now and then I come across personal development specialists who claim to help everyone who wishes to manage his time effectively. They then proceed with elaborate sometimes complicated solutions that end up consuming even the little time we have left. Implementing some of the time management advice out there leads one deeper into time management problems. So what is the best approach to time management?

If there was one single best way to manage time all time management books and advice will dwell on it. Commonsense, like in so many other aspects of human life, makes time management easier. Commonsense time management consists of the following practical advice;
a) Daily planning and maybe, weekly: One of the basic lessons I learnt while setting out as a young, inexperienced entrepreneur was to plan each day the night before or in the early hours of the day. It remains to me the most effective way to get the best out of your day. Day planning should involve opening the next page of your daily planner and drawing a line down the middle. On the left column list all the tasks of the new day and on the right delegate as many as the tasks on the left column as possible. After doing that check through what you’ve done once more . Then pick the phone and begin to delegate the releasable tasks. That done, take on the rest of the tasks, one after the other, as urgency determines.

Some experts suggest weekly, monthly and even yearly planning. How on earth can you know what you’ll be doing the whole month or even the whole week. Such long term time planning should be restricted to goal setting. Set your goals for the week, month and year and leave them at. If you insist, you can also draw up your weekly time schedule but keep it flexible as you’ll be doing quite some tasks you didn’t plan for.

b) Delegating: This is one of the fundamentals of effective time management. To so many hands-on individuals they find it difficult to release some tasks to others to do for them. They always think nobody can do the work as good as they can. Choking up your day with tasks that some person can easily do for you leaves no time for you to engage in more fruitful tasks. Learn to delegate all tasks that do not require you to do them. A good rule of the thumb is to delegate all tasks that you can get or pay someone else to do. If you are entrepreneur the only really important tasks are the tasks of refining your system, strengthening the marketing and sales procedures. All other thinks such as financial recording, routine mail, customer service only need supervision from you. If you are a start-up you are likely going to do many of these tasks yourself and your aim should be to delegate them as soon as possible to free up your time for more strategic duties.

Always go through your tasks and delegate right away such ones that can be delegated to competent persons. That way you are actually in control of your time and you will definitely produce more.

c) Spend a Few Dollars to Free Up Your Time: To accomplish more it is sometimes wiser to pay for regular tasks to be done for you by somebody else. If you are an entrepreneur or a self employed professional it pays to focus on paying for services so you can really do those things you do best. Some persons look at the money they are going to spend paying others to do something they could do themselves but it is sort of penny-wise pound-foolish to think that doing all those routine work yourself will save you money whereas giving them to someone else will allow you engage in the real process of making more money.

Jeff Davidson in his book {“The Complete Idiot’s Guide: Managing Your Time} gave examples of people who thought that to pay a few extra dollars for routine services was uneconomical but who on his advice saw that paying those few dollars for the routine services didn’t actually dig holes in their purse and that more importantly they freed up several hours of their day by letting people do those tasks for them. These extra hours they were able to employ either in gaining needed leisure for themselves, having more time to spend with their loved ones or in making more money in their business.

Use the services of part time employees to help you;

Send or sort mail, clean your house, walk your dog etc.

For the starting entrepreneur who is bogged down with tasks to carry out, the services of low charging part time employees could be employed in these areas;
Sending/sorting mails
Making deliveries and pickups
Typing mailing lists or any typing work at all
Keeping things tidy and in good repair
Surveys and cataloging new information
Tracking inventory
Serving routine customer needs

Identify all tasks you don’t like to do, one for domestic, one for career/business in a task matrix form like the example below;
TASKS Option 1 Option 2 Option 3
Task A ……………. ………….. ……………
Task B …………… ………….. ……………….
Task C ……………. ……………. ……………..
Task D …………… ………….. …………….

If you don’t have good options for some of the tasks you don’t like, advertise and interview for part time service volunteers who’ll accept low wages for such part time work as you want them to do. Students and retirees are the best bet. Make a list of all possible helpers and part time workers you’ll gather and use the list when the need arises. If the house is due for cleaning, you go through your services workers’ list and call the best ones available. Do the same thing for every other tasks you would rather not do.
This commonsense time management advice like most commonsense stuff looks simple only if it will be applied.

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According to Peter Drucker, the most important skill in the 21st century is the skill of learning new things. It has long been the habit of top management of big fat corporations to forget how fast things change in our modern world. Every time a new, radical perspective of doing business comes around they react slowest. The corporations they head comes off worse for it.

Peter Drucker ought to have included the very singular importance of learning to unlearn old things and outdated management techniques.

The manager who desires to excel must have an incredibly fluid mind, quick to grasp new dimensions of doing business and fast to discard obsolete information. The manager who insists on going by old trends when new ones are being given far greater attention stands to loose.

The willfully strong Mr Ford had built up his successful Ford car business but at an important time it was necessary for him to switch designs of his model T car he refused to acknowledge the fact that car shapes and designs were becoming sleeker. He fell too much in love with the old situation and resisted change. He paid for it in lost sales and reduced market share.

Severally, I encounter managers who find it difficult to acknowledge the fact that a business practice they found handy a year ago is no longer effective. They desperately want to hold on to the old order while the fast ones move on. This particular factor in Business Management is always encountered in technology-related issues.

Looking at a scenario in the animal world which illustrates this learning factor;

A mouse is faced with two glass compartments containing a piece of fish each. The first glass compartment is open while the second piece of fish is screened off by the glass. The mouse attempts to pick the second piece of fish but is unsuccessful even after several attempts. He reverts attention to the first piece of fish and bingo! He is able to touch at and grabs it.

If another piece of fish is used in replacing the first one it makes a move for it but surprisingly meets a glass wall. Meanwhile the barrier on the second piece of fish had been unsuspectingly removed. Our friend, the mouse most likely will conclude that now both fishes are unreachable and makes do with the one he has eaten whereas he could have enjoyed another piece of fish if he had the knowledge that what he knew before about the second fish no longer applies.

That is what the inability of managers to unlearn causes their companies. They lose further profits and give up market share. The best bet for a business manager is to study all new methods and practices as they come and to constantly be in pole position to take on the potential good ones. Most importantly a manager has to acquire the knack to discard and unlearn techniques, information that no longer matter and quickly adapt to new and better techniques.

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